Until now the idea of preparing for the coming collapse in the UK was seen as faintly crazy, a bit like believing the Mayan prophecy of doom in December 2012.
But sites like post-apocalypse.co.uk, and companies like Emergency Food Storage in Leeds and B Prep in London are reporting sales increasing 10-fold in a year, as Brits get ready for the collapse of the Euro and an almighty recession.
Ordinary families are storing cash, fuel, food and household products in anticipation of a calamitous disruption to everyday life.
Emergency Food Storage is selling products from Mountain House, a U.S. brand that started manufacturing in Britain five years ago.
In the past year alone, sales of its tins of food with a 25-year shelf-life have increased by 350 per cent. The contents of these tins are similar to the sachets of foods that mountaineers and other outward-bounds types might be familiar with. But because they are in cans, rather than packets, they last for 25 years, rather than five.
They are created by cooking a normal meal, such as spaghetti bolognaise, and then freezing it rapidly. Finally, the water content is extracted under pressure, a process known as sublimation.
Freeze-drying preserves the taste of the food as well as up to 97 per cent of its nutritional value. It also massively reduces its weight and bulk. For example, 1,000kg of strawberries reduces to 100kg of freeze-dried fruit. The meals are returned to near-enough their original state by adding water (preferably hot, but cold will do).
But because the process is energy-intensive, the food is not cheap. A six pack of self-heating breakfasts is £32.95
EFS is selling 72 tins of Mountain House food for £2,199.95. This is billed as a deluxe 12-month survival pack of 450 meals. But the same product can be cheaper on Amazon or E-Bay.
Other equipment is similarly expensive. A Grab Bag Emergency Pack filled with survival equipment is over £200. Bushcraft Survival courses start at several hundred pounds for a weekend.
6 Responses
There is always news of a collapse, it’s time to stop speculating, and take life as it comes!
Yeh, I take your point Jonesy – with the right attitude you WILL survive. I was responding to the suggestion that we could stock up with junk food. I think this is extremely bad advice. If you DO decide to store food, then it IS possible to store healthy food (healthier than most of us eat right now.) But yes, you DO need a gizmo (or two.) It’s a better option than supporting the production of this nutritionally-dead crap.
I already have a dehydrator for my everyday living, and use it in combination with that other popular kitchen gizmo, the cooker. I have considered buying a vacuum sealer and putting something away for a rainy day, but never have got round to it – maybe I should. Or maybe I should just live in the moment.
What I’d really like to do is just get off-grid, get away from the power corporations. I don’t think I am any closer to that than I was before I woke up to what is going on.
First off that photo of the extras from a Mad Max movie is hilarious. Those who are beginning to awake are storing up stuff which is fine and to be encouraged, but I feel many less enlightened expect be able to buy their existence and to continue to pig out like they do now but under slightly reduced circumstances.
The key to survival is in learning the ability to survive on bugger all and find or create a plentiful supply of clean potable water and a warm dry place to lay your head at night. In a true survival situation ‘home’ is just a place to crash because you will be spending all the daytime finding stuff to eat. Nature has provided us a banquet, buying six packs of self heating junk from some shyster at £30 a pop is the thinking of a mad man.
Survival is not about how much you can store up and what fancy gizmo you buy, its about standing on your own two feet when your own two feet is all you have. Been there… done that.
Chrissie, true – but then having a garden
and fruit (plums, apples, and figs in late
summer, maybe potatoes and some oranges
in winter though that all depends some on clime)
will do the job, and you still get cans of tuna
or similar stuff that will last you 10 years,
in any supermarket –
pretty cheap, it is actually sort of an investment.
Rich people buy gold, normal people buy tuna,
vodka (may serve as a currency earlier as
we want to believe) –
but what I am asking myself is how these guys make their stuff last 25 years.
I am not sure if I should really believe THAT ?
It may well contain 97% of its nutritional value, but 97% of very little indeed, is even less than very little indeed. All tinned foods are nutritionally almost dead to start with. The canning process ensures this. Best to dehydrate foods yourself, then vacuum seal. A couple of hundred quid for a dehydrator, same again for a vacuum sealer and special bags or jars. And YOU can choose what you put into these containers – healthy fruit and veggies, inexpensive, nutritionally-intense sprouted beans, grains, nuts, seeds. Even meat if you still want to go down that particular road. Make sure you store plenty of purified water though.
While you can find reliable sources with a genuine interest in sharing information and products, just be aware that you will encounter those who plan to cash in on any calamity. These are the same who would sell a $400 generator for $2000, after the hurricane strikes.
The lesson here is, Do Your Research!